[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]I have made a lot of bad decisions in my life: dating the wrong men, dating the wrong men too long, borrowing too much money for a “name brand” education, buying a fixer-upper (a.k.a. money pit) in a never-quite-gentrified neighborhood.
As my son rounds the corner toward his first birthday, I am gratified that at least with him I made one of the best decisions of my life — to have a homebirth. (Did you really think this was going to be some sappy essay about how I love my child? I do, but that is beside the point.)
When I was a few weeks pregnant, I ran into a friend at a yogurt shop. When she asked at what hospital I was giving birth and whom I had chosen as my obstetrician, I announced that I was having my baby at home. She responded by telling me that I was more “hippy-dippy” than she had thought.
Indeed, I am one of the most conventional people that even I know. So it is with some irony that my choice to have my baby at home has placed me in minds of many into that wheatgrass- swilling, no-bra-wearing, long, flowing skirt brigade of anti-establishment women.
But my desire to have a homebirth came before my desire to have a child.
It all started when I went to visit a good friend after she had given birth to twins at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. Although the hospital has a beautiful vestibule, akin to an airy hotel, the actual rooms are like tiny, enclosed cells. And my friend’s description of the assembly-line surgical process of the scheduled Caesarean births was straight out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon — taking something so simple, natural, and complicating it in such an unnecessary, clinical way. It was only then that it clicked, and I realized that all the friends, relatives and acquaintances who had given birth in the past few years had done so surgically.
The Cautious Path
Upon some investigation, the reasons were diverse but not convincing. One mother was too heavy for vaginal birth, another too small. Babies were too big or persistently in breach. The babies or the mothers were high risk. In each case, whatever the purported reason, surgical intervention was the solution. It would have been far more honest if the doctors treating them had simply said, “All roads lead to surgery.” Let’s be honest. The procedure is far more expensive — and enriching to doctors and hospitals—than natural childbirth. Thus, birth, it seemed, had become a problem (really an obstacle to profit) to be solved.
Articles that I had previously overlooked documenting the dramatic rise of surgical births, birth intervention and obstetrician malpractice insurance commanded my attention. When the now popular documentary, “The Business of Being Born,” was released in 2008, I was one of the first in line to see it. Although I was dissatisfied with the births my friends had experienced, until then I never had considered the obvious alternative — homebirth.
If the previously referenced movie wasn’t a final nail in the coffin on the idea of my having a hospital birth, a visit to my (now former) primary care physician was. In order to get my prenatal care covered, my health insurance policy required that I have my pregnancy confirmed. After I told my Beverly Hills doctor that I was planning a homebirth – she pressed a referral for an obstetrician into my hands. The doctor, she said, had delivered her children and was good.
I took the referral with a grain of salt and started interviewing midwives. Then one morning, still early into my pregnancy, the phone rang. It was the obstetrician. He had heard I was planning a homebirth and took time from his busy schedule to call and talk me out of it. Unfortunately for him, he had no clue. Did he know anything (let alone, as much as I did) about homebirths? No. Had he ever attended a homebirth? No. What were his own statistics for Caesarean? He claimed not to know, but my own research had disclosed the statistics in his hospital were ticking into the upper twenties. One thing he claimed to know is that I needed to come on down to his office so he could give me a stern talking to.
They Won’t Scare Me Away
Fortunately, I didn’t allow the scare tactics of doctors and friends to sway me. After all, people have been born outside of hospitals for as long as there have been people, and the species seems to have survived quite nicely. Considering my friends’ tales of crazy nurses, drug interactions gone wrong and doctors who only show up at the last minute to “catch” the baby (and charge a hefty fee), they were not inducing me to follow a different path. I did not want to be cared for by someone on his or her “shift,” only to be passed along to the next worker.
My grandmother, who was born at home, and who had seen many of her siblings born right in her parents’ bed, assured me that it would be just fine. (Full disclosure, her own grandmother had died during childbirth, but she was also in the first generation of freedmen, just a step away from destitution. Moreover, the advances in civil rights that allowed black women into hospitals had not been the biggest boon to healthy childbirth. The rates of mother and infant death among our women rival a “third world” country – right in the cradle of a “first world” nation. In a world where race could determine treatment, I was not eager to throw myself into that arena.)
Unlike many mothers I have encountered in various settings over the last eleven and a half months, I can honestly say my son’s birth was a wonderful experience.
Labor was long and uncomfortable without drugs. But I was cognizant of every moment, and I cherish the memory. One midwife sat with me the entire day (my baby was a latecomer, born around 7 in the evening). The other midwife called, came over to my house to check me, and sat with me in the comfort of my bedroom in the days leading up to my son’s birth. I was able to labor in my own house, and do what I like – whether that was eat, drink, play with my pets or just be. My baby was born in my own bed. He was handed to me right after birth – the blood allowed to leave the umbilical cord at its own pace before our physical bond was severed. I was able to nurse him from the beginning, no worries about nurses spiriting him away or feeding him formula on the sly. When all was said and done, I was already home. I could sleep in my own bed to get some rest, ready to assume the new role of parent.
Yes, I did consider what to do if something went wrong. Almost everyone asked that question, sometimes in hushed tones, sometimes more stridently. My answer was the same. I would go to the place for sick people – the hospital. But sick care is not what I wanted for my birth. For once, I was glad I stayed home. It was the best decision I could have made.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
